Mental health needs assessment of children and adolescents

Needs assessment is essential input for program planning. Little data are, however, available about the various approaches and whether strategies for needs assessment are viable. It was found by an inexpensive methodology that opinions about the importance of various services, opinions about the potential acceptance of services, services provided, and the total need for services are interrelated. A hybrid approach that utilized data from teachers and the people that provide mental health services was also a practical means to obtain information about the unmet needs of children and adolescents in the country. Data supported the value of this technique for the assessment of the unmet needs of children and adolescents. Thus, an inexpensive methodology can provide useful information from multiple perspectives.     

Time preference and labour migration in an OLG model with land and capital

This paper constructs a two-country migration model in the lines of Galor (1986), in which the world population consists of individuals of two types who have different time preferences. Production uses three inputs: mobile labour, immobile capital and land. It is shown that both countries are necessarily inhabited by agents of both types and exhibit equal density of population and equal interest rate at the steady state equilibrium of the integrated economy. The steady state welfare implications of international labour migration are studied.This paper has been written during Philippe Michel's visit at CORE, September 1994. Earlier drafts of this paper have been presented at the meeting Journées d'étude générations imbriquées (Marseille, November 24–26, 1994), at the ESPE conference (Lisbon, June 1–3, 1995) and at the EEA annual meeting (Prag, September 1–3, 1995). Comments by participants are gratefully acknowledged. We are also grateful to Stéphane Déo, Kamhon Kan, Pierre Pestieau, Christoph Schmidt and two anonymous referees for helpful comments. The usual disclaimer applies.Responsible editor: Alessandro Cigno     

A socioeconomic analysis of the determinants of fertility: the case of Vietnam

This paper is an economics-based quantitative analysis of the determinants of individual fertility in Vietnam, measured as the number of children ever born. In addition to the conventional linear model, two limited dependent variable models, Poisson and ordered-logit, are estimated using data from the 1988 Vietnam Demographic and Health Survery. We find, among other things, that husbands‘ characteristics are almost as important as those of wives in determining fertility, perhaps a reflection of the still dominant role of husbands in Vietnamese families. Both paternal and maternal education have important impacts on fertility. Of special interest is the evidence that supports the attitudinal effect of education over the opportunity-cost effect. Received April 22, 1996 / Accepted January 13, 1997     

Intergenerational redistribution in a small open economy with endogenous fertility

For pay-as-you-go financed pension systems, claims may be calculated according to individual contributions (income) or the number of children of a family. We analyse the optimal structure of these parameters in a model with endogenous fertility. It is shown that for both structural determinants there exists no interior solution of the problem of intragenerational utility maximisation. Thus, pure systems are always welfare maximizing. Furthermore, children-related pension claims induce a fiscal externality that tends to be positive. The determination of the optimal contribution rate shows that the widely accepted Aaron-condition is in general a misleading indicator for the comparison of fully funded and pay-as-you-go financed pension systems. Received March 12, 1996 / Accepted January 27, 1997     

Log-linear models for mutations in the HIV genome

We discuss a general application of categorical data analysis to mutations along the HIV genome. We consider a multidimensional table for several positions at the same time. Due to the complexity of the multidimensional table, we may collapse it by pooling some categories. However, the association between the remaining variables may not be the same as before collapsing. We discuss the collapsibility of tables and the change in the meaning of parameters after collapsing categories. We also address this problem with a log-linear model. We present a parameterization with the consensus output as the reference cell as is appropriate to explain genomic mutations in HIV. We also consider five null hypotheses and some classical methods to address them. We illustrate methods for six positions along the HIV genome, through consideration of all triples of positions.     

Riesz inverse Gaussian distributions

The notion of generalized power of a positive definite symmetric matrix and a related notion of generalized Bessel function are used to introduce an extension of the class of matrix generalized inverse Gaussian distributions. The new distributions are shown to arise as conditional distributions of Peirce components of Riesz random matrices. Things are explained in the modern framework of symmetric cones and simple Euclidean Jordan algebra.     

Stochastic volatility modelling in continuous time with general marginal distributions: Inference,prediction and model selection

We compare results for stochastic volatility models where the underlying volatility process having generalized inverse Gaussian (GIG) and tempered stable marginal laws. We use a continuous time stochastic volatility model where the volatility follows an Ornstein–Uhlenbeck stochastic differential equation driven by a Lévy process. A model for long-range dependence is also considered, its merit and practical relevance discussed. We find that the full GIG and a special case, the inverse gamma, marginal distributions accurately fit real data. Inference is carried out in a Bayesian framework, with computation using Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC). We develop an MCMC algorithm that can be used for a general marginal model.     

Transitions from employment among young Norwegian workers

In a large representative sample of young Norwegian workers, we estimate gross transitions to unemployment, education, and other exits in a multinomial logit. In line with received literature, we find that individuals with high education, experience, and income have significantly lower probabilities of job exits. While female education rates have increased to surpass those of males, female labour market outcomes are still more responsive to family related background characteristics as compared with the outcomes for males. Received: 17 October 1996/Accepted: 5 March 1999     

Of rotten kids and Rawlsian parents: The optimal timing of intergenerational transfers

This paper shows that altruistic parents with utilitarian preferences may fare better if they transfer resources to their children early in life instead of delaying the bulk of transfers until after their death. Moreover, the outcome of the analysed “family transfer game” is not Pareto-efficient in the case of bequests. However, if altruistic parents hold Rawlsian preferences, they will be indifferent between gifts and bequests, and Pareto-efficiency is always obtained. In intermediate cases of Atkinson-type welfare functions, welfare losses of bequests compared to gifts disappear as the aversion to inequality converges to infinity. Received: 3 November 1998/Accepted: 4 May 1999     

The socioeconomic consequences of young women's childbearing: Reconciling disparate evidence

Recent studies have begun to examine rigorously the links between early childbearing and subsequent socioeconomic status. Prominent in this literature has been a set of analyses that have used sibling fixed effects models to control for omitted variables bias. These studies report that the siblings difference procedure leads to smaller estimates of the effects of teen fertility than does standard regression analysis. While it is well known that the siblings fixed effects procedure makes strong assumptions regarding the type of omitted variables and is not necessarily robust to alternative assumptions, the assumptions of the procedure have not been explicitly examined. This paper uses 1979–1992 data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth to compare estimates of the income and education consequences of teenage and young adult fertility from standard regression and siblings fixed effects models with estimates from more general, alternative siblings models. Received: 19 January 1998/Accepted: 6 April 1999